How To Add A Scratchpad To The Menu Bar In macOS

macOS has a text editing app called TextEdit. It’s a simple app that can save notes in TXT format but can also be used to edit scripts and HTML files, among other things. It’s a lightweight app that comes in handy quite often especially for saving unstructured content that you might need later. Of course, if you want to use it as a scratchpad or just as a text holder for random snippets of text or code, it’s a bit much. Simply launching it can take too much time. Tyke is a free menu bar app that is a better choice. The app adds a scratchpad to the menu bar that you can paste text to.

Add A Scratchpad To The Menu Bar

Tyke is simply a text holder. It doesn’t save text as a file but any text you paste in it is remembered unless you delete it yourself. Install the app and run it. It adds a little notepad icon to the menu bar.

Click this notepad icon to open the scratchpad. You can type inside the scratchpad or you can paste clipboard content to it. To close the scratchpad, click anywhere outside it. When you open it again, it will still show you the text you last typed or paste in it. If you quit the app however, or restart your system, the text will be lost. Any text that you paste in the scratchpad will be scrubbed of all formatting.

There is no limit to how much text you can paste inside the scratchpad. It’s a convenient little text holder that should meet most basic requirements. It’s purposely designed to be simple so it doesn’t suffer from a lack of features. Anything that isn’t there e.g. an option to save text, is that way by design.

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The app does not detect if the text you pasted is code or not. Anything and everything appears as plain text. The lines aren’t numbered and there is no aid to help you read better. There are no text editing options so you cannot change the font size, or underline anything.

Not A TextEdit Replacement

Although Tyke can hold text and strip formatting from it, it is in no way a replacement for TextEdit. If you’re looking for an app that does what TextEdit does but is easier to access, Tyke isn’t the answer. The app cannot open other files which means you can’t use it to edit HTML files or scripts. The best way to sum up what Tyke is, to think of it as a bit of paper you have lying around that you might scribble a phone number on so you can later save it to your contacts.

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Chap Harrison

Even TextEdit forces me through an Open… dialog. This is perfection. Thanks.